[kinkora]

I can't remember where i heard this from (it was a podcast) but it was on an economic theory that, if you exclude the internet & computer revolution, humans has not progressed that much in the past 100 years and that we may have entered a period of stagnant growth that may extend a century. Again, internet & computer revolution aside, realistically saying the last "human leap" was the invention of the combustion engine and prior to that, it was the discovery of electricity.

So he proves this out by taking an example of what happens if you hit someone on the head and assuming that person sleeps for a long time, how will he feel out of place in the world. Here are the examples I remembered he used (paraphrasing):

1. If you take someone living in the 1700s, knock them on the head, and have them wake up any time till the mid 1800s, to that person, life feels almost the same even though 100s of years have passed. Sure, maybe there are more buildings, more people, more horses, weapons are more or less the same, etc but essentially life is still familiar.

2. Now take someone living in, lets say 1850, knock them out and have them wake up in 1880. Holy shit, suddenly the world is so much brighter and there are "lights" everywhere. What witchcraft is this?? The world will look so different from what he/she remembers them.

3. Now take that same person living in 1880, hit them on the head again and have him/her wake up 35 years later and it is 1915. HOLY DOUBLE CRAP, what is this new fangle machine on wheels on the streets people are on and where have all the horses gone?? Ok I need to go into the toilet and wash my face...OMG WHAT IS THIS FLUSHING THING AND THIS METAL SPROUT CREATES MY OWN CLEAN RIVER??? Walks to the city and wow, look at all these buildings looking like mountains! And not only that, he/she looks up in the sky and sees gigantic "metal birds"...WTF YOU CAN RIDE THEM AND NOW GET FROM LA TO NY in a couple of hours?? The world will look completely magical to them.

Now here is the interesting thing - if you take someone from 1920s, hit them on our head, and put them in 2020.. that economist surmises that life will look pretty much the same to that person, not unlike scenario (1) where you take someone from 1700s and put them in the 1800s. Vehicles might look a bit more modern, buildings might look a bit more taller or "sleek-er", there are way much more people but essentially, the world hasn't really change much. Oh, there is this new computer & internet thing but that's it.

So yep, it is nothing to do with you. We just happen to live in a time where we have yet to experience a "leap" in invention where life has become completely magical to us. My guess will be, the day space tech becomes a common place and attainable, that will be when the world looks magically different to those of us living today and that generation will feel the same leap as the inhabitants living from 1850~1920.

[overcast]

Sure, excluding two of the biggest revolutions in the entire history of humanity, really makes it seem like we've been doing absolutely nothing. The impact of the semiconductor / integrated circuit can not be overstated. I don't know about the rest of you, but the Internet still seems to be completely magical to me.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

Born in 1981, computers and the internet seem mundane to me.

But I thoroughly agree that they are the two (one?) biggest revolution in history.

[momentbruh]

> Oh, there is this new computer & internet thing but that's it.

This sentence is doing an unbelievable amount of work. I don't think you realize how strange it is that we have instant-speed trans-Atlantic communication that can transmit massive amounts of data. Computers are practically foreign objects to plenty of people born in the 60s, who grew up as they were invented. You don't think someone from 1920, with no prior exposure to them, would think that a smartphone is just a standard part of everyday life?

Not to mention all the other massive changes to society that you ignored. Commercial flights started in the 1920s and are now commonplace in everyday life. Digital audio; televisions; massive changes to cars; ATMs and credit cards. Can you imagine someone from the 1920s trying to operate a Dyson AirBlade?

This is before accounting for the crazy rate of cultural change that would shock someone from 100 years ago. Half the words used in daily conversation wouldn't even make sense to someone from 1920.

[chr15p]

"instant-speed trans-Atlantic communication" started with the laying of the first trans-atlantic telegraph cables in the 1860's, and allowed machine to machine communications, messaging, shopping, there are even cases of people marrying after meeting over the telegraph. Radio was in use by the 1920's and a smartphone is basically a personal 2-way radio with pretensions!

I think a lot of modern tech is really just 19th century tech done (a lot) better, smaller, faster, more conveniently, and much more widespread.

[abecedarius]

I was born in the 60s and I hold with the people who think we've been in relative stagnation, despite sometimes getting that living-in-the-future feeling. The 80s and 90s felt like progress was picking up after the 70s malaise, but not like the decades around 1900 as I've read about them. Since 2000ish it's like we went down the wrong trouser-leg of time.

[fogetti]

You could make transatlantic calls in the 1920s. Sure, it was not that fast or capable as the internet, but the fundamental capability of connecting the world together has been around for a century or so. So it's not that strange as you try to make it to be.

[pjc50]

The future is not evenly distributed. That might work with 1920s New Yorkers, but for many other places round the world the change has been huge, dramatic, and somewhat traumatic. Heck, even if you take someone who isn't a white guy from 1920s New York, you'll find the world looks very different to them.

1920 was at the beginning of the wave of post-1914 turmoil of the end of empires. Europe had been swept by war and revolution, and nobody would have known how that was going to turn out. Poland was still about 10% Jewish. China was still in the "warlord era" before the rise and fall of the KMT. India (and much of the rest of the world) was still British.

For a sense of the quasi-feudal pre-war Europe, I will always reccomend A Time Of Gifts, Patrick Fermor's walk across Germany and Eastern Europe in the 1930s.

[timonoko]

My father born in Russian Grand Duchy of Finland in 1912, saw a car first time in 1925. It was little scary, but he realized it was basically "a small locomotive on rubber wheels". So it goes, you just rationalize, nothing is ever really amazing.

And yes. When I first time a programmed a real computer in 1972, I was truly amazed, because I tought the "programs" were just a way represents algorithms and the "computer" was just an theoretical machine. At first I thought there was another human at the other end of Teletype-line, but the bloody "computer" was just too fast.

[Nasrudith]

Really there have also long been been a mix of "new" tech introduced in a niche and "roll out" of old tech infastructure to more places often aided by the previous making it cheaper or possible. Aquaducts and irrigation canals existed for millenia and some have had indoor plumbing of sorts ahead of schedule for quite a while. Rural electrification and indoor plumbing initatives often meant the difference. It took time for it to be more widespread from wherever it was the most convenient. Rural areas had party lines

One unspoken difference from "just" computers directly between 1920 and now is checking in on farms or factories is wondering where everybody went and if they checked in on a nursing home would likely make them think there was an underpopulation crisis.

[grmarcil]

I agree that 1880-1915 was certainly a period of radical change, but aviation in 1915 was way less mature than you are suggesting, and would not become so for several decades.

The SPT Airboat Line [1] was the closest to an airline in the US at the time. It operated 20 mile flights across Tampa bay for 6 months in 1914 before ceasing operations.

Flying from NY to LA was not happening on any regular basis, and took much more than a couple of hours. The first transcontinental flight in 1911 [2] took 80+ flight hours over more than a month. Fast forward to 1933, transcontinental passenger flights took 20+ hours [3]. Nonstops finally became available in the late 40s and early 50s.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Petersburg%E2%80%93Tampa_A... [2] https://pioneersofflight.si.edu/content/first-american-trans... [3] http://www.boeing.com/news/frontiers/archive/2003/may/i_hist...

[pessimizer]

> Again, internet & computer revolution aside

I count the last technological leap as the transistor. We could have conceptually come up with computers and the internet any time over the past couple thousand years, but the use of electricity brought possible designs down to a useful speed, and transistors finally brought them down to a useful size.

edit: tbh, I think CMOS was also a big jump. A big leap in the efficiency of power consumption would also spur a massive revolution.

[blondin]

yep. npr ideacast and same thing that came to my mind. the conclusion was that we are in a slow progress period and there hasn't been a revolutionary invention like electricity or the combustion chamber. our productivity has been slowing down as well.